Donald Trump’s Existential Pickle

IF your very candidacy and identity rest on your supposed talent for victory, can you survive a defeat?

Can you continue to call yourself a winner if you’ve been a loser — and if “loser” is your favorite way of closing the book on someone, your final word, the workhorse in your brimming lexicon of slurs, exiting your mouth so reflexively that it’s essentially your exhalation, your carbon dioxide: “loser,” “loser,” “loser.”

Donald Trump has a problem that the other candidates for the Republican nomination don’t. He’s put an obstacle in his path that they haven’t. He doesn’t merely assert dominance. He claims something close to omnipotence. (Remember that laughable physician’s report?)

Neither his image nor his ego leaves any room for a setback, any allowance for second place. And as Iowa draws near and several polls suggest the strong possibility that Ted Cruz will finish ahead of him there, it’s time to talk about what that would mean for a self-enamored emperor who pretty much insists on his own perfection — and who has built his brand on it.

At that point, Trump would no longer be a brilliant exception to the laws of political gravity. He’d be someone whose lax management of his Iowa operation was laid bare, whose basic competence was in dispute. He’d be one of many exhausted soldiers, girding himself for a muddy slog. That’s not the path he plotted, the myth he’s selling. That’s not how he’s rigged.

Other candidates can rack up a few disappointments. They haven’t made their cases by pointing to their percentages, their ratings, their crowds. They don’t draw such a sharp, unforgiving line between winners and losers. They don’t equate being on top with being the best.

Trump does. Incessantly. It’s his worldview, his philosophy, his morality, his tautology.

He’s inverted the usual political logic. Typically, candidates cite their qualifications as the reason that voters should affirm them. Trump asserts that he’s qualified because voters have affirmed him, or at least because they seem poised to.

Challenged on his policies (which don’t really exist) or his credentials (which are dubiously applicable to the presidency), he whips out his poll numbers as proof of his worthiness. Sometimes he whips them out just for fun. And as he holds them high, he makes the argument that he must have good ideas, good sense and good preparation. After all, he’s winning!

But by that reasoning, losing wouldn’t be just a fluke, just a failure of the body politic to recognize and reward majesty when they behold it. No, it would be evidence that he’s inferior or at least unexceptional. It would destroy the brand’s foundation.

His bid for the presidency is all triumphalism, all superlatives. It rejects any humility. It forbids any humbling — especially the first time that voting becomes actual instead of theoretical and Iowans crown a champ.

When he kicked off his campaign from the gilded throne of Trump Tower last June, he didn’t merely say that he’d create jobs.

“I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” he decreed, emphasizing a divine patrimony.

On the day when he and his hair move into the White House, “unbelievable” blessings will rain down on this parched land of ours. He will be “the best thing that ever happened to women,” “the best security president.”

And did you know that he has “the world’s greatest memory,” by his own estimation?

“It’s one thing everyone agrees on,” he added, which is wrong, because many of us at The Times don’t agree at all, especially not after the most recent Republican debate, on Thursday night. He was asked then about his proposal, made during a recent meeting with the newspaper’s editorial board, for a 45 percent tax on Chinese goods brought into this country. And his magic powers of recollection eluded him.

“That’s wrong,” he said. “They were wrong. It’s The New York Times. They are always wrong.”

Except we weren’t, not about this. A transcript and an audio recording of the meeting unequivocally demonstrate as much.

We’re probably losers anyway. That’s the designation he assigns to anyone who fails to genuflect in his presence.

He has meted it out promiscuously — and diversely. The megastar Cher is a “loser.” So are the mogul Mark Cuban, the basketball player Chris Jackson, the war hero John McCain.

The ranks of talk show hosts, journalists, pundits and political consultants are especially robust with losers, including Ana Navarro, Bill Maher and Karl Rove, who’s not just a “loser” but “dopey” and a “total fool,” as Trump tweeted. His testy Twitter feed is his Hall of Shame. It’s where the losers are rounded up and publicly flogged.

And his go-to arguments for why someone is a loser, a dope or a dummy is that he or she has made erroneous predictions or been repudiated by the ratings, the marketplace, the audience. A television personality is a loser if not all that many viewers tune in.

So what if not all that many Iowans turn out for Trump? What if, at the least, more of them choose Cruz? How can Trump dismiss the precise kind of judgment and measurement with which he dismisses everyone else?

Lately he’s started to hedge, alternating prophecies that he’ll win Iowa with statements that he hopes to. It’s “a little too close for comfort,” he told voters in Cedar Falls last week. I’ll say.

For other candidates a loss is a part of the process, a prompt for self-examination, a cause for a reset and maybe an embarrassment. For Trump it’s an existential crisis. Who is he if he can’t look down on all of his rivals? What does he become if he has to look up to one of them, especially if the one is a natural-born irritant like Cruz?

“Comeback kid” won’t fit Trump. It’s a middle seat in coach for a titan with his own planes — plural. (His own helicopters, too.) If he’s wedged into it, he’ll come unglued. I mean, more than he already has.

When he appeared on the late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last month, Kimmel teased him by claiming to have written a children’s book for Trump. Its title? “Winners Aren’t Losers.”

This is my point, and this is Trump’s pickle. If Iowa’s voters don’t swoon for him, it erases the whole gaudy prelude to that moment. He ceases to be the best, the most, the greatest. Trump will have been trumped, which means he’s not the same Trump at all.

Correction:

An earlier version of this column mistakenly included Howard Stern among a list of people Donald Trump has called a “loser.” Mr. Trump was referring to the lawyer Howard K. Stern, not the radio personality.